14 DAY TRIAL // The launch of Demigod, created by Gas Powered Games and published by Stardock, was plagued by issues. First, GameStop broke the street date of the title, releasing it earlier and leading to a torrent of piracy. Then, the publisher failed to take into account the impact of pirated copies on a mainly multiplayer title and a lot of players had big connectivity issues during the first few games, while infrastructure issues were sorted out.
Still, Brad Wardell, the Chief Executive Officer of Stardock, has said that “people are going to pirate a game whether it has draconian copy protection or not and the people who will buy a PC game will buy it and the people who won’t won’t,” while the initial problems were caused by “our inexperience in publishing multiplayer-centric games caused us to underestimate the server infrastructure needed.”
The servers that enable multiplayer play have been separated from those hammered by pirate copies and getting in an online game should be very easy. Stardock is also saying that it will apply a philosophy of “games as service” to Demigod and that it will continue to provide support for the title for a long time, no less than one year, through updates created by Gas Powered Games.
The updates will not be available to those who are running pirated copies but they will dramatically improve and expand the experience of those who have legitimate copies of Demigod. Wardell has stated that “we can start to talk about the kinds of things we can add like team based joining, how clan support should be, what kinds of items people would like to see, what kinds of additional demigods people want, and so on.”.
Most reviewers believe that Demigod is a very interesting videogame, quick, full of options and with plenty of surprises. Unfortunately, the user interface is a bit confusing and the game must be played quite a lot in order for the gamer to learn even the basics.